Joseph Robert Wilson

“Most people hammer your mind with Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis or as my old friend, the late Robert Anton Wilson, said: "Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am." I can't tell you how much that tired old formula skeeves me. When I do see people brave enough to (god forbid!) put the onus of drawing a conclusion back on the reader (heresy!), I am not only relived (what, me have to think?), my faith in humanity has it's execution stayed another day.””

“Every time I pass through customs between Mexico and the U.S. I feel certain sensations of anxiety. I "know" I have no illicit drugs in my car, but I begin to wonder, confronted by the hostile and suspicious eyes of the Texas Border Patrol, if some damned drug or other somehow got into the car without my knowledge . . . Did somebody who dislikes my books "plant" some to frame me? Did some young idiot admirer of my works slip some into a video cassette case, a book or other gift as a surprise, not knowing I intended to cross a border the next day? Do these Border people sometimes "plant" drugs themselves, to improve their arrest record? Like Joseph K. in The Trial I begin to feel sure they will find me guilty of something, even though I do not know of any crime I have committed.””

“Actually I started that back in 1959. I was reading Science and Civilization by Joseph Needham, and I was thinking that I agree with the Taoists more than any other religion. And I started asking myself why. It occurred to me that in the Western World Judaism, Christianity and Islam all refer to God as He. That creates an image of a cosmologically huge human being and, I thought, “Now I can’t take that literally.” Yet, at the same time, although I’m not absolutely convinced, I do have a very strong intuition of some kind of cosmic intelligence. I’m an agnostic on the level of not being passionately convinced. I just have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence.””